http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/2/11/13150/2984

That is just propaganda KV!! Everyone knows that 90% of the guns in Mexican crime are from the US. From gun shows nonetheless

Caliman73 wrote:That is just propaganda KV!! Everyone knows that 90% of the guns in Mexican crime are from the US. From gun shows nonetheless

no, no no, they're all bought by druglords at your evil local gunshops in the thousands. Because as everyone knows criminals always obey the law, ALWAYS shop at reputable well tracable stores and local gun dealers LOVE selling guns to thugs so they can terrorize them and their families at night. I really wish there was a sarcasm punctuation mark.

...So the grey part of the pie is "untraceable" then? That's awfully convenient for those blaming the US for "90% of Mexico's guns".


DKOS is down right now, I'll try back later before I go into work tonight.

Dkos is transitioning to the new site.

I am not trying to be a shit... but I don't think that says anything new... .although it does a nice job of illustrating it quite plainly. 90% of guns sent to the US for tracing were traced to the US. Granted, that message has been garbled on high a few time but that isn't anything new.

The rest of the pie chart is complicated. Why weren't the guns in the big part sent off for tracing? Because they knew they didn't come from the US? Because they just picked a random sample? Those are two very different extremes.

Without all of the other info, we still don't know much.

Frontline gets into the fray big time:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... urce=feeds

Xela

Sources tell CBS News several gun shops wanted to stop the questionable sales, but ATF encouraged them to continue.
Jaime Avila was one of the suspicious buyers. ATF put him in its suspect database in January of 2010. For the next year, ATF watched as Avila and other suspects bought huge quantities of weapons supposedly for "personal use." They included 575 AK-47 type semi-automatic rifles.
ATF managers allegedly made a controversial decision: allow most of the weapons on the streets. The idea, they said, was to gather intelligence and see where the guns ended up. Insiders say it's a dangerous tactic called letting the guns, "walk."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/ ... 5609.shtml

JayFromPA wrote:

Sources tell CBS News several gun shops wanted to stop the questionable sales, but ATF encouraged them to continue.
Jaime Avila was one of the suspicious buyers. ATF put him in its suspect database in January of 2010. For the next year, ATF watched as Avila and other suspects bought huge quantities of weapons supposedly for "personal use." They included 575 AK-47 type semi-automatic rifles.
ATF managers allegedly made a controversial decision: allow most of the weapons on the streets. The idea, they said, was to gather intelligence and see where the guns ended up. Insiders say it's a dangerous tactic called letting the guns, "walk."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/ ... 5609.shtml

Can you say Entrapment of the dealers? All that proves is that if they let those who are obviously up to no good continue on their way, they will do just that. It's like an ant farm; if you let them build their small empire, you can watch as they do it and see the crime ring form--right before your eyes!

[Sarcasm]
We decided to let the rapists stay on the streets so we could see what neighborhoods they would target. [/sarcasm]

JayFromPA wrote:

Sources tell CBS News several gun shops wanted to stop the questionable sales, but ATF encouraged them to continue.
Jaime Avila was one of the suspicious buyers. ATF put him in its suspect database in January of 2010. For the next year, ATF watched as Avila and other suspects bought huge quantities of weapons supposedly for "personal use." They included 575 AK-47 type semi-automatic rifles.
ATF managers allegedly made a controversial decision: allow most of the weapons on the streets. The idea, they said, was to gather intelligence and see where the guns ended up. Insiders say it's a dangerous tactic called letting the guns, "walk."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/ ... 5609.shtml

On the phone, one Project Gunrunner source (who didn't want to be identified) told us just how many guns flooded the black market under ATF's watchful eye. "The numbers are over 2,500 on that case by the way. That's how many guns were sold - including some 50-calibers they let walk."

OK, so just for the sake of argument here, let's entertain the idea that statistics presented in the OP may have been manipulated for effect and that the guns to be traced were selected in a less than random manor. According to those numbers, 4,000 guns were traced to the US, yet in the quote above, 1/8th of that number is accounted for by AKs allowed to be sold illegally by the ATF. The single case cited above accounts for more than half of those 4,000. How many more cases are there? How many other sales do they "let walk"? Do they use a similar tactic with gangs? I'd really like to get legitimate answers to this.

We as a country really need to take a long look at the BAFTE:
Their purpose
Their actual role in law enforcement
Their structure and rules
Their accountability

The entire organization should be gone over and scrutinized with a fine toothed comb, and the whole thing needs to be weighed against our rights, rule by rule. I think that if we honestly took this on and true reform were allowed to happen, that the agency would still exist, but I think its scope and role would (and should) be greatly diminished.

I've said before that I am not opposed to the NICS system of background checks, but really, what's the point if the regulating agency for the firearms world in the US is just going to "let them walk" to the tune of thousands when they feel like it--just so they can come down particularly hard on a little guy just to make an example?

AmirMortal wrote:According to those numbers, 4,000 guns were traced to the US, yet in the quote above,

You grabbed the wrong number. 4K successfully traced, 3480 traced to the US. I wonder where the trace on the other 520 went...

So 3480 traced to the US, minus 2500-or-more quoted as intentionally released to the wild, means 980 is the upper boundary on guns that were bought in the US and made their way to mexico.

heres an idea why not place a remote device in the gun that makes it not function after it's left the gun store? I mean you can even put a bug in the butt of the rifle.

gendoikari87 wrote:heres an idea why not place a remote device in the gun that makes it not function after it's left the gun store? I mean you can even put a bug in the butt of the rifle.

Well, it's hard to justify taking wrench/screwdriver to each of the several dozen rifles a guy is buying when the serial number is stamped right there visible on the side. That would sorta provoke more scrutiny of the units by the purchaser. And they didn't have any useful advance notice that the purchase was coming. A phone call "Hey, how many AKs you got? Done, sold, I'll be right there." with the customer showing up very shortly doesn't provide the kind of time required to plant a tracker.

Involving the shop owners actively in the process is also undesirable, so no sending shops 30 or 40 bugged AKs for them to sit on and only dispense to a bulk purchaser.

There's also the question of the bug itself. Mexico isn't littered with communications antennas that are open to US listening, so the signal would have to be powerful enough to punch through the ionosphere - which I believe bounce ham radio signals from continent to continent - and that power doesn't fit into a buttstock. Never mind the antenna length, which is non-negotiable by the laws of physics. Which leads me to think, if the sci fi is plausible, of tagging through sensing nuclear radiation. Problem with that is that mexico is not exactly a backwater, they do have a substantial tech infrastructure. They have their own comm satellite system. They make more smartphones than china! I think nuke radiation might get noticed, and the subjects of the spying would likely hear about it long before anything really important could be discovered. Plus, when a bunch of cartel folks get sick and hair falling out and joint pain and gums bleeding and whatever else is part of radiation sickness - google would inform them they'd been tagged.

lol, nuclear tracing won't make you sick, they don't use levels that high, and you don't need a large or even powered bug or even communications infrastructure, the soviets put a but into a gift clock they gave to us that didn't require a battery and sent signals all the way back to them from washington.

Edit: sorry it wasn't a clock it was the great seal.

gendoikari87 wrote:lol, nuclear tracing won't make you sick, they don't use levels that high, and you don't need a large or even powered bug or even communications infrastructure, the soviets put a but into a gift clock they gave to us that didn't require a battery and sent signals all the way back to them from washington.

Cite the gift clock bug please?
I'm thinking of signal degradation, dissipation, interference through atmospheric conditions and solid barriers. I note that in heavy storms, the signal from a tv satellite easily breaks down on the way to the dish on the side of a house, and that's got a more powerful signal than something buried in a wood stock or buffer tube juiced with a couple AA batteries.

http://www.predatorconservation.com/radiotracking.htm

That collar won't fit into the internals of a rifle. And the signal from that collar bounces off rocks and mountains. Without multiple antennas, it's nearly useless for actual location tracking.

"When searching for radio collared animals in a large study area, the most effective way to locate the animals quickly is to use an aircraft fitted with radio tracking equipment. Whereas tracking from the ground may give a range of one or two miles (depending on the terrain), tracking from the air has a much larger range - up to 30Km in some cases. When use of an aircraft is either not practical or is too expensive, climbing a hill to take the readings is also an effective way to boost the range."

The idea is to be able to track the humans from a safe distance, which is definitely not achieved with a mere 30 kilometers (19 miles)

This gift clock sounds like a movie concoction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_bug the actual device itself was incredibly small, and this is back at the height of the cold war.

gendoikari87 wrote:lol, nuclear tracing won't make you sick, they don't use levels that high, and you don't need a large or even powered bug or even communications infrastructure, the soviets put a but into a gift clock they gave to us that didn't require a battery and sent signals all the way back to them from washington.

Edit: sorry it wasn't a clock it was the great seal.

Hmmm... From your link:

It hung in the ambassador’s Moscow residential study until it was exposed in 1952 during the tenure of Ambassador George F. Kennan

It was in moscow, beaming signals to moscow. Not in washington. Transmission distance required: Negligible.

Also funny how that is entirely impossible to be used in the manner you proposed, as you have to hit it with the radio waves of enough strength. Directing a beam at a stationary spot from just a few hundred yards away is a hell of a lot easier than blanketing several thousand square miles of Mexico desert. With an old wireless router I had to fashion a cardboard/foil parabolic reflector so that the signal would penetrate through my fridge to my tivo beyond, that's a lot easier than making a stronger unit that can overcome the fridge in an undirected manner.

And amazing that the signal it sent out was 1800 mhz. I recognize that frequency! It's used in modern cell phones! It's part of the tri-band. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands And we all know that cell phone signals do, in fact, fade out long before they can possibly cross all that mexico desert. That fade-out is the whole reason they are called 'cell' phones, for the honeycomb pattern of towers that are required to be in place so that when a mobile phone leaves range of one tower the neighboring tower can pick up the phone and conversations continue uninterrupted.

Seriously, I am speaking from an understanding of the basic fundamentals here. For a bug to shout across a few hundred miles of open desert mexican terrain and be heard by an ATF tower at the US border, it needs more power than can be fit into a vehicle-mount let alone hand-carry. There is a REASON that radio towers are so large and tall and suck up so much power and still only have a limited range. They do not function on star trek links through subspace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-of-sight_propagation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_horizon

oh wow I thought it was in washington, learn something new everyday.

And amazing that the signal it sent out was 1800 mhz. I recognize that frequency! It's used in modern cell phones!

Really, REALLY! wow, so none of the russian bugs are safe anymore.....

Seriously, I am speaking from an understanding of the basic fundamentals here. For a bug to shout across a few hundred miles of open desert mexican terrain and be heard by an ATF tower at the US border, it needs more power than can be fit into a vehicle-mount let alone hand-carry. There is a REASON that radio towers are so large and tall and suck up so much power and still only have a limited range. They do not function on star trek links through subspace.

so we put cell phones in there, these criminals are going back to society somewhere, and mexico isn't so devoid of technology it doesn't have any cell phones, right?

I sure do love Bucky. He's absolutely my most favorite comic. Never at a loss for something truly new and completely off the wall, that bucky katt.